Analyzing Children´s Speech: An Acoustic Study of Consonants and Consonant-Vowel Transition

This paper presents several acoustic analyses on read speech, collected from 5 adults and 35 children aged 5 to 17 years, focusing on consonants and consonant-vowel transition. Characteristics of consonants such as duration, intra-speaker variability and, for stop consonants, voice onset time are analyzed and compared with results achieved on vowels. Strong and significant correlation with age is observed for both duration and intra-speaker variability. In fact, younger children show higher phone duration and larger spectral and temporal variability than older children and adults. Voice onset time, on the other hand, is less correlated with age. Analysis of consonant-vowel transition shows that the duration of the transition and the amount of spectral difference between consonant and vowel are clearly age-dependent. Younger children, in fact, show shorter transition duration and larger spectral difference between consonant and vowel in the consonant-vowel pair